Their Reality Has Lapped Our Satire - 10 years later

Well, I’m back from my 3 months on house arrest, and my only regret is that I wasn’t able to publish what follows on July 6th, the 10 year anniversary of the original diary.

Ten years ago last month I first wrote the diary, “Their Reality Has Lapped Our Satire.” Since then, that phrase has become a bit of a meme. 

It has shown up in books about politics:

It’s been quoted by academics:

A regular reader of this blog made an astute observation a few months ago; in response to a discussion of seemingly ridiculous behavior by some political figure or other, he noted that “Their reality has lapped our satire.”

No kidding.

It has been used repeatedly in titles to blog diaries:

Their Reality has Lapped Our Satire

I know from my super-top-secret contact in the State Department (codename: Maestro) that State is in a big personnel crunch right now, what with the passport backlog and all. So it's natural that it might turn to outside contractors for help. But please, when writing an initial report investigating the Blackwater shooting incident,please don't outsource the job to a Blackwater employee

Their Reality has Lapped Our Satire

Jeff Weintraub introduces this doozy with a single sentence: "Not a parody."

Once Again - Their Reality has Lapped Our Satire

Parents opting out of Obama speech invited to Gattitown

Call it the Pizza Protest

Their Reality has Lapped Our Satire

This Brownback supporter has a post entitled:

Heliocentrism is an Atheist Doctrine

Normally, I refrain from linking to wingnuts, but I'd love it if this one was spread far and wide.

Heck, it’s become both a hashtag and one of those things “people say.”

A quote I heard a few years ago:

“Their reality has lapped our satire”.

This is just far enough over the top that it has to be a parody, but it's still under Poe's Law (and Honig's corollary, which is of course "Their reality has lapped our satire")

This is the post Citizens United world. This is not peak wingnut. This is not a satire. The world has become Onion. Their reality has lapped our satire.

It has been a solid decade since I first heard, and subsequently stole, the phrase: "Their reality has lapped our satire."

The situation has not improved.

My gods…their reality has lapped our satire…

*epic double facepalm*

So where did it all start?

Back in the Summer of 2006 I was drawing cartoons. I wasn’t that good, and they weren’t that funny, but I tried. Like this one:

and this:

And then something happened. After spending a few years drawing cartoons to satirize the most egregious edges of the political right, I was bested by, well, reality. As I put it back then:

 How could you cartoon the religious right's confidence that this is a Christian country, and that anybody else is here at their sufferance?  Let's diagram the issue, and see what comes from it.  First, what is the greatest symbol in America of welcome?  What is the most obvious national monument to open arms, the availability of the American dream to one and all?  You got it- the Statue of Liberty.  There is really no second choice.  Okay, good.  Now, how to use the Statue of Liberty to caricature the religious nuts?  Well, maybe we could replace the torch, the beacon lighting the way for one and all, into an exclusive symbol, marking the way for only Christians. Got it?  Right, replace the lamp with a cross. But wait, we need a little more. What to do with her other hand? She's holding a tablet, remember?  It has July 4, 1776, on it, the day we declared our independence.  But hey, it's a tablet.  You know what to do.  Replace that silly date with some commandments. But there's one more problem- that pesky poem welcoming non-Christians.  That has to go. Let's replace it with the commandments again.  After all, "shalt nots" are a lot more fitting with the whole theme than language of welcome.  Okay, we're ready to draw a cartoon, one that will really skewer the right, really cut to the heart of their hatred, their bigotry, their hypocrisy.  But before we do, let's do a quick check of the internet, just to make sure we're not doing something that's already been done.  What do we find?

And what did I find? The picture at the top of the diary. Here it is again, so you don’t have to scroll:

Yeah. That’s real. A church spent a quarter of a million dollars that could have been used to feed the poor, to shelter the homeless, to teach the ignorant, on that statue. My cartoon was their reality!

But that wasn’t the end of it. It just kept getting worse. I had to write That’s it. I give up. I just give up. when self-proclaimed Christians decided the best way to get out of the 2008 economic crisis was to go to Wall Street, lay hands on the bronze bull in front of Merrill Lynch, and pray for God to intercede on their behalf. As I said at the time:

“Christians,” praying at a golden calf, for economic wealth. Seriously, people, how the f*#k do you satirize that?

So here we are today, in 2016, and Donald Trump is the Republican nominee for the Presidency. He’s running as an outright racist, preening like Mussolini and speaking words from 1930s Nuremburg rallies, hinting that a follower should kill his opponent and trumpeting an ignorance of international relations, international economics, and well, reality that would drive the world into a Greatest Depression, a nuclear conflagration, or both, and I wonder if we can ever even find our way back to reality.

As for satire? Rotting somewhere in an unmarked grave, to be forgotten in a generation or two.